Mikhail Baryshnikov and Tymberly Canale light up the stage as smitten and unlucky lovers - with more points of light than one can count - in the luminous "Man in a Case" that opened Sunday at Berkeley Rep's Roda Theatre. The characters are Anton Chekhov's. The mesmerizing Big Dance Theater blend of acting, movement, video and music is by adapter-directors Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson.

There are so many elements of pure pleasure emanating from the stage that it's hard to know where to focus one's eyes or ears. But the heart of these poignant, remarkably uplifting tales of misplaced or thwarted love is in the multifaceted interactions between Canale and Baryshnikov.

They're working in remarkably fertile ground. "Case" is adapted from two of Chekhov's late short stories - the title story and "About Love" - and Chekhov was as great a master of that form as he was a playwright. These are the first and last stories of a trilogy of Russian country tales, each told by a different man on a lackadaisical hunting trip.

"Gooseberries," the middle story, forms a bridge between them that makes sense in print but isn't missed in Lazar and Parson's adaptation. Besides, its subject's misplaced love - for tart berries - would be but a distracting digression from their tightly focused theme.

The deceptive casualness of the staging masks the sharp focus at first. As the audience enters, the men of the company gather at a row of ordinary tables on one side of the stage. Overheard snippets of their chatter gradually turn to hunting - turkey hunting, specifically. No sooner has a casually dressed Baryshnikov related a sly tale of shooting a big tom in Florida, than Lazar and music director Chris Giarmo, clad in all-American hunting gear, have eased into Chekhov's first story.

Lazar is rural schoolteacher Burkin, relating the strange case of his former colleague, the preternaturally uptight classics teacher Belikov. Baryshnikov's body seems to take hold of him, lift and deposit him on the floor, writhing insect-like into the long black coat, hat and gloves in which Belikov encases himself against the weather and any human contact - or scandal - that might tarnish his prim, solitary existence.

Baryshnikov's shoulders, neck, voice and hawk-like eyes emit such natural and deep-felt censorious certainty that it's no wonder Belikov's priggish paranoia has infected not only the school but the whole town. Until, that is, a new, Ukrainian teacher (the erect, bellicose Aaron Mattocks) arrives with his lively, joyful and very pretty sister Barbara (Canale), in a bright bustle of Parson's buoyant folk-based choreography and Giarmo's ethereal song.

Baryshnikov takes over as teller and main character - the well-educated, lonely farmer Alyokhin - of the shorter "Love." Canale is Anne, the young, married townswoman who becomes his soul mate.

Their yearning, abortive romance, achingly expressed in glances and almost touching hands, is a perfect coda after the lyrical uplift of the funeral that ends the first story. Somehow, too, that funeral becomes the indelible affirmation of life within this expertly packed "Case."